YouTube Shorts Transcript Scraper — the format most tools skip

Transcripts for every Short on a channel. Most transcript tools only handle long-form video and quietly return nothing for Shorts.

What it does

• Download transcripts from YouTube Shorts
• Export all Shorts captions from a channel
• Bulk Shorts transcripts to JSON or CSV
• Build a dataset from short-form video
• Analyse Shorts scripts and hooks across creators

Pass several channels at once. Each row is tagged with its source channel.

Why Shorts specifically

Shorts are where the volume is — channels publish them far faster than long-form — and they are where hook and script analysis actually pays off, because the whole video is 60 seconds of copy.

The catch is that most Shorts carry auto-generated captions only. This scraper's language fallback goes human-written → auto-generated → any available track, so it returns text where tools demanding a manual track return nothing.

You only pay for transcripts

reason	Meaning	Charged
— (ok: true)	Transcript returned	Yes
no-captions	Short has no captions at all	No
unavailable	Deleted, private, or region-locked	No
blocked	Extraction route failed	No

Input

Field	Required	Description
channels	yes	URLs, @handles, or channel IDs
maxShortsPerChannel	no	Newest first. Default 100. Your cost ceiling.
language	no	Two-letter code. Default en.
includeSegments	no	Add timestamps. Default false.
maxConcurrency	no	1–25, default 10

Output

Every row has the same fields whether it succeeded or failed, so you can select columns without branching. Failed rows are never charged.

Field	Type	Description
sourceChannel	string	The channel input this row came from.
success	boolean	True when a transcript was returned. Failed rows are never charged.
videoId	string	YouTube's 11-character video identifier.
videoUrl	string	Canonical watch URL for the video.
title	string	The video's title as published.
channel	string	Display name of the channel that published the video.
channelId	string	YouTube channel identifier, stable across renames.
durationSeconds	number	Length of the video in seconds.
viewCount	integer	Views at the time of the run.
language	string	BCP-47 code of the caption track returned.
isAutoGenerated	boolean	True when the captions were machine-generated rather than human-authored.
segmentCount	integer	Number of timed segments in the transcript.
fullText	string	The complete transcript as one plain-text string. Null on failure.
segments	array	Timestamped transcript segments. Only present when includeSegments is enabled.
errorCode	string	Machine-readable failure reason. Null on success.
errorMessage	string	Human-readable explanation of the failure. Null on success.

Example — success

{
  "sourceChannel": "https://www.youtube.com/@MITOCW",
  "success": true,
  "videoId": "jNQXAC9IVRw",
  "videoUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw",
  "title": "Me at the zoo",
  "channel": "jawed",
  "channelId": "UC4QobU6STFB0P71PMvOGN5A",
  "viewCount": 358194821,
  "durationSeconds": 19,
  "language": "en",
  "isAutoGenerated": false,
  "segmentCount": 3,
  "fullText": "All right, so here we are, in front of the elephants. The cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really, really long trunks.",
  "errorCode": null,
  "errorMessage": null,
  "segments": [
    {
      "start": 0.84,
      "duration": 3.2,
      "text": "All right, so here we are, in front of the elephants."
    },
    {
      "start": 4.04,
      "duration": 3.6,
      "text": "The cool thing about these guys is that they have"
    },
    {
      "start": 7.64,
      "duration": 2.9,
      "text": "really, really, really long trunks."
    }
  ]
}

Example — failure

A failure carries the same fields, so nothing downstream has to branch.

{
  "sourceChannel": "https://www.youtube.com/@MITOCW",
  "success": false,
  "videoId": "s1CFmzZzO4c",
  "videoUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1CFmzZzO4c",
  "title": "Board meeting recording",
  "channel": "Example Corp",
  "channelId": "UCzzz999",
  "viewCount": 412,
  "durationSeconds": 3120,
  "language": null,
  "isAutoGenerated": null,
  "segmentCount": null,
  "fullText": null,
  "errorCode": "no-captions",
  "errorMessage": "This video has no captions published, so there is no transcript to return."
}

Error codes

• no-captions
• unavailable
• blocked
• empty-transcript
• unparseable-input
• error
• unparseable-channel
• channel-blocked

Use it for

• Shorts transcripts — the whole short-form feed of a channel
• YouTube Shorts captions — spoken text from vertical video
• Tutorial transcripts — short-form how-to content
• Hook and script analysis across a creator's Shorts
• Short-form content research and competitor tracking
• RAG over short-form libraries, training datasets

Related actors

If you need	Use
Specific videos you already have URLs for	YouTube Transcript Scraper
The channel's long-form videos	YouTube Channel Transcript Scraper
Every video in a playlist	YouTube Playlist Transcript Scraper
Videos from a keyword search	YouTube Search to Transcripts
Comments instead of the spoken text	YouTube Comments Scraper

Use it from an AI agent (MCP)

This Actor is callable as a tool through the Apify MCP server, so Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and VS Code can run it directly.

Add the server to your MCP client:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "apify": {
      "url": "https://mcp.apify.com",
      "headers": {
        "Authorization": "Bearer <YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>"
      }
    }
  }
}

Then ask for what you want in plain language — for example “get transcripts for this channel's YouTube Shorts” — and the agent calls cleanfeed/youtube-shorts-transcript-downloader with the right input. Every output field is described in the dataset schema, so the agent knows what it is getting back before it runs anything.

Call it from code

Python

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>")

run = client.actor("cleanfeed/youtube-shorts-transcript-downloader").call(run_input={
    "channels": ["https://www.youtube.com/@TED"],
})

for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    if item["success"]:
        print(item)

JavaScript

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: '<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>' });

const run = await client.actor('cleanfeed/youtube-shorts-transcript-downloader').call({
    channels: ["https://www.youtube.com/@TED"],
});

const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
console.log(items.filter((i) => i.success));

cURL

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/cleanfeed~youtube-shorts-transcript-downloader/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>" \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"channels": ["https://www.youtube.com/@TED"]}'

Limitations

• A residential proxy is required. YouTube serves playabilityStatus: ERROR to datacenter IP ranges while the identical request succeeds from a home connection — measured 12/12 success on residential against 0/12 on a cloud host with no proxy, and 7/12 through a datacenter proxy. The input defaults to residential; changing it will break most runs. Full method and per-environment figures are published in the reliability benchmark.
• Not every video has captions. Videos with captions disabled return errorCode: no-captions and are never charged. This is a property of the video, not a failure of the run.
• Shorts only. The channel's long-form videos are a separate surface — use YouTube Channel Transcript Scraper for those.
• Many Shorts carry only auto-generated captions, flagged by isAutoGenerated: true.

FAQ

Do I need a YouTube API key?

No key, no OAuth and no quota.

Does this cover the channel's normal videos too?

No — Shorts only. Use YouTube Channel Transcript Scraper for long-form.

Do Shorts even have captions?

Most carry auto-generated captions, flagged with isAutoGenerated: true. Shorts without any caption track return errorCode: no-captions and are not charged.

Why do I need a residential proxy?

YouTube serves errors to datacenter IPs. Residential egress is the default here and is why runs succeed.

Notes

Only publicly available caption data is collected. No login, no personal data, no video downloads.